The Nonexistent Correlation between Violence and Faith

A German study which suggests that there is a correlation between violence and religiosity among young Muslim males is -- will wonders ever cease -- not well received among Muslims.

Berlin - A German Muslim leader demanded Monday a re-analysis of data which suggests that young Muslim males develop violent attitudes when they become more devout attenders at mosque.

The data, to be presented at a government conference in Berlin, was leaked in advance and was front-page news in the German media.

"It lacks an expert interpretation on the cause of the phenomenon," responded Aiman Mazyek, general secretary of the Central Council of Muslims in remarks reported in the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. He called for another analysis of the data.

The study, based on interviews with 45,000 boys and girls aged 14 to 16, also concluded that male supremacist views and a preference for violent videos and computer games link closely with mosque attendance among the young.

The as-yet unpublished research was jointly conducted by the Federal Interior Ministry and the KFN criminology research institute in Hanover headed by Christian Pfeiffer.

The authors' interpretation was that youth developed aggressive attitudes because a majority of mosque clergy in Germany did not speak German and encouraged their congregations to practice a conservative form of Islam and to preserve their ethnic roots.

In fact, the man who performed the study, the criminologist Christian Pfeiffer, did everything not to disamuse Muslims to an extent that made him ring hollow:

Pfeiffer wrote: 'This is not a problem with Islam, but a problem with their education in Islam.'

Well, yeah, whatever.

Still, the German Muslim community doesn't see this as a reason for soul-searching or self-criticism, if it is true at all, it must be because of the alienation Muslim youths are experiencing in Germany on a daily basis, and nobody laughed or asked why that doesn't apply to youths "with a migration background" of other religious denominations as well.

As it is, we can trust that somebody somewhere will "re-interpret" the data until it meets Muslim approval soon.

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More about Mazyek here and specifically here.